Stéphane Mandelbaum from Brussels: 1961-1987
דער ייִדישער — may his memory be a curse!
(On the subject of Post No. 2 - The School of Yehuda Pen - Yudel Pen. Another Jewish artist who anticipated his violent death.)
The Paris Review: “To understand the Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, it is best to begin at the end of his life. Few agree on how he lived, but most agree on how he died. It was garish and violent. He was shot in Namur, in central Belgium. Acid was splashed on his face to make his body harder to identify. His corpse was thrown into a landfill. He was twenty-five years old. His bright, brief life and his art-brut style are often compared to those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, but whereas Basquiat found his way to the center of the art world, Mandelbaum was always an outsider. His life was a mixture of realities and self-imposed fictions that were so potent that even he forgot who he was. At the crucial moment of his death, Mandelbaum thought he was a hardened criminal when, in truth, he was closer to a doughy artist, a controversial but ultimately bashful poet of the visual.
His death came in December 1986 when he had attempted to steal a painting by Amedeo Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo from an elderly woman’s home in Ixelles, a tony suburb of Brussels, along an avenue studded with art deco buildings. He had been promised money for the painting from friends who had connections to the black market. Having made almost no money from selling his own art, which was largely deemed too perverse and risqué, he desperately needed the funds. The problem was that there is no such painting by Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo. [Modigliani is known to have multiple fakes] What he stole was entirely fake. It is impossible to know whether Mandelbaum was aware of this or not—or whether or not the woman who owned it knew—but, when he turned it over, his buyers realized the truth and murdered him. That is, at least, the most agreed upon story. Almost nothing about Mandelbaum is certain.”
Bloomberg: “In a sequence of events that’s still debated (the phrase “mysterious circumstances” is often used), Mandelbaum seems to have insisted on being paid for his efforts, at which point he was shot in the head, acid was poured over his face, and his corpse was dumped in a desolate section of the city. No one was ever charged.
Mandelbaum wasn’t a famous artist during his lifetime, but his death briefly occupied the French and Belgian headlines. It took another 30 years for anyone to start seriously paying attention to his art.
Now, after a small show of his work at the Pompidou in Paris in 2019 and a subsequent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt last year, Mandelbaum’s work will be introduced in the US at New York’s Drawing Center in SoHo.”
The exhibit in SoHo is over. The catalog of the NY exhibition, with a wonderful introduction by the curator Laura Hoptman, is available online.
I heard a review of the above painting by some idiot NY pretend expert: “It’s not clear who is making the statement, the father to the son or the son to the father.” LOL
Stéphane Mandelbaum was obsessed with Yiddish culture. His father Arié is a Painter (a serious artist in his own right) and his mother Pili is an illustrator. His mother is Armenian. Stéphane Mandelbaum was allegedly refused a Jewish burial.
Graphics of Stéphane Mandelbaum remind me of Egon Schiele because pornography often enters or centers the compositions, like the above portrait. Along with the ubiquitous Holocaust images.
There are a bunch of reviews online, they all don’t have the feel for the Jewish aspects of the art, something I intend to correct here.
Stéphane was killed in December 1986. In February, he was working on his yichus. Upper-left corner. I would guess the multiple doodles are the dead.
This was before the internet! Peretz Markish boat is going to go down, together with the European and Russian Jewish culture. But amazing list of the Israeli and Yiddish writers. Some big names are missing, no Chaim Grade and no Der Nister. I don’t think those two giants were even known in Poland/Belgium.
There is a boat travel route, from Brussels to Congo. More on that later.
Skilled graphics and not a care in the world to cover it with casual doodles. Look at the hands. White cloud of the totalitarian propaganda poison that was learned from the priests.
This is masterful, what a panache, minimalist but expressive! Very brave art!
Goebbals is asleep or dead? With a blade to his throat.
I think this is a list of people interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in the 1985 documentary Shoa.
It’s a miracle all those doodles got preserved. Preservation of the archive is a major challenge for an artist whose relatives might not have the mental capacity to care. When you die young, your parents or children might have the understanding of the importance of the preservation of the archive. They might have the physical and mental strength. Then the archive might have a chance to survive. It also helps that Stéphane's father is an accomplished artist, so he gets it.
Artists often die alone in a strange land… Like the Jews of the Shoa. Is Shoa and Gulag over? Let me know…
Arié Mandelbaum was born in 1939 or 38. Where is his family?
In America, they wanted to forget the Holocaust. Until Elise Wiesel “discovered” it in the 70s and gave everyone permission to speak. In Europe, it was impossible to hide.
Jamaican rasta song:
By the rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yeah, Yeah, we wept
When we remembered Zion
When the wicked
Carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
Now how shall we sing the Lord's song
In a strange land?
Stéphane Mandelbaum married Claudia, a woman from Congo, and adopted her child.
Is it the pain or pleasure? It is forever both.
There are two suspect statements that you find in the media. One that he was dyslexic as a child and therefore the outlet in art. Laura Hoptman is correct in dismissing this. And second, that he was gay. Woke desire to make everyone creative a gay. Common, just look at his art.
I can use some French here.
This is an engraving, so it is smaller. The portly shoychet is getting ready to do his business. We will meet those hooks in the work of the visual poet. Stéphane Mandelbaum died 25 yo, so he had only ten years or less of the creative output.
Stéphane Mandelbaum painted this when he was 15, he was anticipating his violent death only ten years later. He didn’t get shot in the genitals. He got two shots to the head, his face was disfigured by acid, few months after his death his body was discovered by playing children.
But those genitals, are the source of the major turmoil in the creative life. And those hooks Stéphane seen by dem shoychet. They made an impression.
At the peak of his creative life, Stéphane Mandelbaum was working almost continuously. Not a thought to the commercial value of his art. Often this is how true “value” is born. Stéphane Mandelbaum had to wait 30 years after his death.
Those doodles are the best form of mediation. The darn computer destroyed the art of a good doodle. I have notebooks filled with them. It also the best way to ignore a class.
There are many portraits of Francis Bacon, who was an obvious influence.
They are also several portraits of Pier Paolo Pasolini, another big influence. Pasolini was also murdered.
What is abbreviated in the upper-right corner?
This looks like a homage to Francis Bacon with some free styling Nazis or Yiddish, to keep it consistent.
